Category: The future

New Year’s wishes, of the marine electronics kind 29

New Year’s wishes, of the marine electronics kind

New_Morning_data_network

Aside from Panbo’s able crew of regular commenters—some of whom I’ve gotten to know personally, and all of whom I appreciate—the sixty thousand plus unique monthly visitors here are a somewhat mysterious mishmash of marine electronics enthusiasts, product info searchers, and trades people. Actually I also know a lot of folks in the trade who read Panbo regularly, and have been told that several companies have a designated monitor tasked with passing along relevant entries and comments to management. How 2009/Web 2.0 cool is that? And it means that if you’d like to express your wishes for the marine electronics future, you will be heard…

Golden Shellback, waterproof your gadgets? 10

Golden Shellback, waterproof your gadgets?

Golden Shellback blackberry

That’s a Blackberry getting dunked in pan of water, which it apparently survives just fine, thanks to a new “vacuum deposited” polymer coating process called Golden Shellback. You can see the CNET video “Waterproof your gadgets” below, Gizmodo filmed a cell taking a call while in a glass of ice water, and Tekzilla had some fun with an iPhone. But I’m a little confused…

Best new tech 2007, anything for boats? 6

Best new tech 2007, anything for boats?

Nanosolar PowersheetAt this point in the year I like to cruise around the various “Best of” tech lists, mostly for geeky fun, but also looking for innovations that may eventually trickle down to the boating world. Like Popsci.com’s Innovation of the year, which is this flexible, light, and supposedly inexpensive Powersheet solar panel at right…

Navionics 2008, cruising with Giuseppe 5

Navionics 2008, cruising with Giuseppe

Navionics2008_cPanbo

Yesterday I got to spend a few hours on a Navionics test boat tooling around Bass River, Cape Cod (unfortunately damnable cars and planes were also involved in the trip). A few of us boating writers got to fool with eight chart plotters, and see first hand what Navionics is up to for 2008 (very cool, but I can’t write about it just yet). Another highlight…

Garmin Developer Zone, wow? 3

Garmin Developer Zone, wow?

Today Garmin announced a slew of new tools meant to encourage third parties—commercial and otherwise—to interact every which way with Garmin hardware. I’m not a developer, but my quick read suggests that possibilities include writing...

Jeppesen C-Map, the press conference 0

Jeppesen C-Map, the press conference

It wasn’t surprising that Jeppesen Marine’s Miami press conference was meatier than Navico’s. Jep’s acquisition of C-Map had been through a many-month due diligence process and had already closed before the boat show. I came away thinking...